eah, it was another smoking dream. A nicotine-patch dream, the kind you can't pull yourself out of no matter how horrible, because it's too real. Drug dreams are common enough — I remember a week or so of recurring acid dreams, which were interesting. But for six straight weeks now, recurring, nicotine-enhanced smoking dreams have shaken my world. I struggle to separate dreams from reality, as nicotine courses through my blood without the aid of cancer sticks — a surreal and quite foreign experience in itself.

Smoking is cool, but far more important, it's a tremendous pleasure — a forbidden pleasure, especially in health-conscious Southern California. These are the scumbags who invented smoker harassment, who pioneered the first non-smoking sections, then outright smoking bans in most indoor places. Now, the effort is on to ban smoking in every workplace and even some outdoor locations — bars and casinos included.

Don't get me wrong — environmental tobacco smoke definitely needs to be brought under control the way we worked to eliminate lead-based paint and asbestos. But around these parts, the effort amounts to a religion. These are the people who discovered that workplace smoking bans force people to quit smoking or quit their jobs, who spread through their culture that smoking is a disgusting habit; who reduced smoking to 15% of the population, one of the lowest rates on the planet.

They know a lot about putting the pressure on smokers, even if they don't value personal freedom as much as the rest of the country. And they got me right after I hit town.